10.19.2011

• A student at Cambridge in 1979, artist John Devlin was forced to move home to Canada after a year due to mental illness, and ever since he's been obsessed with the university's architecture -- the beauty and mathematics of it; the new book NOVA CANTABRIGIENSIS features Devlin's renderings of reimagined and reconfigured Cambridge buildings as they appear on his imagined utopian island of the same name in Nova Scotia's Minas Basin.

• In a similar vein, photographer Dacia Pierson explores the meat industry, noting that a half million chickens are killed for food each hour in the U.S. "Within the American food system, this process is largely hidden by the USDA and willfully ignored by consumers," she writes. "The project aims to create more transparency in this system."

• Walker director Olga Viso (full disclosure: my boss) on what the Istanbul Biennial is lacking: "an indefatigable spirit of generosity and faith in the potential of art to not only transcribe the exigencies of the present moment but transcend them too."